One of the hardest things about writing a story about magic is to have a story. See, when you have magic, it can do anything. Magic can make all your problems literally disappear. So how do you have something threaten your characters when one blink of her eyes (or flick of her wrists) can make it all go away? That was what I was faced with when I sold my genie series to my editor. I pretty much sold the idea on, “I have this idea of a story along the lines of I Dream of Jeannie meets Indiana Jones.” That was it; that was all I had. I knew the genie, Eden, had been sentenced to her bottle for 3,000 years, got out early, and then I heard the Indiana Jones’ theme music. That was it. So, yay! I sold a trilogy. Now I had to write it. And I quickly found out that like genie wishes, magic is not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, it sounds good, but if the bad guy is after you, poof! make yourself invisible or take a long vacation to the other side of the world. If the guy you’re in…

Thanks so much for having me back to talk about my latest release, CATCH OF A LIFETIME, the story of Mer princess Angel Tritone (younger sister to Rod and Reel from the other two stories), and Logan Hardington, a Human who wants nothing more than Normal in his life. A Mer(maid) is as far from Normal as you can get. I had a lot of fun with this series, both with the stories themselves–the characters’ journeys–and the storytelling. See, I was a language major in college (my degree is in Spanish). As such, I had to take a second foreign language (French), and had taken that and some German in high school, in addition to the required English courses. I loved all of them because I love language. I hadn’t realized how much I did though, until I started writing IN OVER HER HEAD, the first book in my Mer series. Oh, the story started off pretty straightforward, nothing to indicate it would veer down the pun-filled slope it did. When the Mer man, Reel, showed up I still had no clue. Then Reel’s sidekick showed up, a suckerless remora fish named Chumley, who goes by the nickname Chum. Okay,…

Okay, so I don’t actually have pigs flying in my latest Mer book, Wild Blue Under, out this month from Sourcebooks Casablanca. But I do have seagulls. And peregrines. An albatross with an agenda. Oh, and a couple of sparrow sleuths with delusions of grandeur. Well, one has delusions, the other’s just delusional. What’s the difference? You have to meet Adele and Maybelle to find out. But wait, isn’t my series supposed to be about Mers? As in Mer men and Mer maids? Yes, I do write about Mers (we Humans were the ones who added the gender tags), but in Wild Blue Under we’ve got a literal fish-out-of-water story. In In Over Her Head, we had a Human-in-the-water story; now the tide has turned. Rod, prince of the Mer world and heir to the throne (his brother, Reel, was the hero of book 1, and, yes, you are supposed to laugh at their names. Their parents have the same screwy sense of humor I do.) In order for Rod to claim the throne, The Oceanic Council decrees that he must return the lost Mer princess to their world. Should be a piece of kelp, right? Curious? read the rest…